Creating and sustaining a performance buzz

Can Gamefication motivate Contact Centre staff?

Tina Forrester, Customer Services, Senior Group Manager at Blizzard Entertainment explores the power of gamefication in motivating contact centre professionals.

More and more our lives are becoming enmeshed into the digital world; contact centres are becoming increasingly technically enabled and complex.

How do we upskill and motivate employees to deal with this challenge?

We can harness the power of gamification and bring it into our business world to enhance performance and energise our workforce.

Using gamification components as part of ones approach to performance management can increase motivation and sustain high levels of performance taking a fun approach, generating healthy competition and a offering a visual representation of achievement, which can support performance management ownership and accountability on the individual, which then becomes increasingly self-sustaining.

Gamification is used to market products across all spectrums to capture and retain the interest of customers, building brand loyalty and retention eg:

Facebook and mobile phone apps

Education sites such as Duolingo

Couch to 5K and running apps

Weight Watchers, and other healthy lifestyle sites

Daily task management activity tracker, such as Epic Win

Can we find ways to adapt this approach to a performance management, in a heavily metric-focussed environment and make it fun?

Yes, we can! Adopting an intrinsically-driven approach to motivation and then rewarding positive behaviour are the keys to success.

Gamification principles:

Learning can be fun – make a ‘game’ out of it (socialising and mastery)

Design with progression/achievement in mind

Visualise progression success eg awards, banners, badges

Visibility of results can be shared through league tables, or focus initiatives

Celebrate success

It should be fun!

Have you introduced Gamefication into your business? We’d love to hear your experience…

Reading:
For the Win: How Game Thinking can Revolutionize Your Business (Kevin Werbach & Dan Hunter)
The Gamification of Learning and Instruction (Karl M Kapp)